As the use of personal computers proliferates in everyday business and personal life and as the use of peripheral devices becomes more and more standard at each individual desktop, the space on the individual desktop has become extremely crowded. Computer manufacturers have used different approaches to address the problem of a crowded desktop. These approaches have included various stacking schemes, such as stacking the monitor or printer on top of the computer chassis, combining the mouse and the keyboard as an integral unit, or making the computer or peripherals narrower and taller, such as the computer tower.
Manufacturers of flatbed scanners have made minimal strides in reducing the footprint of the flatbed scanners, and overall, flatbed scanners still take up too much space on the desktop. Some scanner users have moved to sheetfeed scanners, which take up significantly less desktop space than the flatbed scanners. However, sheetfeed scanners do not have the scanning capabilities of a flatbed scanner, such as scanning bound documents, scanning fragile documents and photographs, scanning objects thicker than a sheet of paper, scanning odd shaped objects, etc. A flatbed scanner offers these and other scanning capabilities over the sheetfeed scanner, but takes up a great deal of precious space on the desktop. This leaves scanner users with the choice of trading desktop space for scanner functionality. It would be desirable to have a scanner with the flexibility and functionality of a flatbed scanner that only takes up the desktop area of a sheetfeed scanner.